In addition to the stories we tell ourselves about the present, the stories that we tell to explain our past and the stories that we tell about our future also determine how we act in the present, which, ultimately, is all that matters.
...In Dec. 2010, as I held our tiny, one-month old granddaughter, Kimaya, in my arms, surrounded by our family, two thoughts crossed my mind
...It was the summer of 2009, a dark night in a remote wildlife sanctuary nestled in the Western Ghats of India.
...In my 2011 book, Carbon Dharma: The Occupation of Butterflies, I used the metaphor of the Caterpillar and the Butterfly to recast the human story in a positive light, where we do belong exactly as we are.
...The story of separation which has animated Western civilization and which has now been imposed globally, must now end in a common story of reunion and redemption for all humanity.
...In our Caterpillar phase, the human ego has risen high as we have become more and more deluded that we are separated from Nature. As a result, even our stories about supernatural deities have become tinged with human hubris.
...Our egotistical thinking is then reflected in the attributes that we assign to our deities.
...At their core, all faith and wisdom traditions, including secular humanism, contain the same nugget of truth that only compassion for all Creation helps Creation thrive, whereas unbridled violence to any part of Creation cannot endure.
...I contend that in an inexorable march towards that idyllic world, we had to create a mess to begin with! This is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary factual evidence.
...Our story rationalizes most of these seeming imperfections as the necessary suffering that had to be endured in our Caterpillar phase as we built out the technological foundations of our Butterfly phase.
...In general, we orient ourselves based on a creation story, a story that places us within the Universe and imbues our life with meaning and value.
...Therefore, the difficulty is not with the creation stories per se, but with the cultural stories that rule our daily lives. When our cultural stories don’t match reality, we tend to do things that are not true to ourselves, that are against our core “Dharma”.
...It is necessary for us to correctly answer the "Who Are We?" question, at least from a purely biological sense so that we can put the puzzle pieces together on the much more important "Why Are We Here?" question later on.
...Unfortunately, humans are not biologically equipped to be like carnivores. Our biological characteristics such as our colons, intestines, saliva, jaws and teeth, which have been relatively unchanged for the past 200,000 years, are not designed for the consumption of animal flesh.
...When I immigrated to the US and came to know of the horrific conditions in which dairy cows are raised in the US, I justified my continued consumption of dairy products telling myself that it is different in India. I spun a cocoon of denial...
In the Hindu view, all that is “good” is God or Brahman. Truth is God, happiness is God, peace is God, and so on.
...When the cultural stories that rule our daily lives don't match reality, that's a sure sign that we have become truly disconnected from our core Dharma.
...We like to think of ourselves as dominating the Earth. The factual evidence for this perspective is abundant. We are destroying forests, killing wild animals, birds and fishes with little to no opposition from them.
...The question of free will is an age-old one that has exercised minds for millennia. Currently, Neuroscience has advanced to a point where it is possible for a computer to accurately predict the choices that an individual is going to make, well before he or...
Any relationship is a connection established to meet the needs of the two parties involved. Our relationship with the Earth is no different. Ideally, our relationship with the Earth must meet our needs as a species while also meeting the needs of the Earth and...
“Industrial toxins are now routinely found in new-born babies, in mother’s milk, in the food chain, in domestic drinking water worldwide… Humans emit more than 250 billion tonnes of chemical substances a year, in a toxic avalanche that is harming people and life everywhere on...
The Earth transitioned into the Holocene era about 12,000 years ago, an interglacial period of remarkable climactic stability, which allowed organized human civilizations to flourish[16]. Environmentalists and climate scientists have mainly attributed this remarkable climactic stability to good fortune.
...We must build parallel institutions and organizations that protect us from corporate assault and resist corporate domination. We must sever ourselves as much as possible from the vampire state. The more we can create self-contained communities, with our own currencies and infrastructures, the more we...
The industrial era is when most of the technologies that we see today got invented. In the process of creating and deploying these technologies, we have had to burn a lot of fossil fuels, destroy a lot of forests, pour a lot of fertilizers and...
Imagine that we are Earth doctors and we are being asked to diagnose the Earth's condition and prescribe a course of action for healing and reversal. Let's take each of the planetary boundaries and examine the root cause for the human induced perturbations in the...
Modern animal husbandry is a marvel of technology. From instruments that guarantee the impregnation of animals to machines that milk dairy cows and the disassembly line that is the modern slaughterhouse, technology has relentlessly squeezed the resource requirements for livestock production.
...It’s a human condition to be blind to our foibles. It is very difficult for us to correct for that blindness when the dominant culture encourages and subsidizes those foibles.
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